Running Stack

The largest rapid on the Nantahala River comes right at the very end. Just before it begins, there is a concrete beach. Boaters who do not wish to run the rapid, known as Nantahala Falls or, more commonly, the Falls, pull off at the concrete beach. If they are NOC rental guests, they just leave their boat right there and walk back to campus. At the end of the day, a staff person from NOC goes up to the beach, collects the boats, and runs them through the Falls. This is called running stack. Today, for the first time, that staff person was me.

Actually, there were two of us charged with running stack. We walked up to the beach and found two double duckies (inflatable kayaks). We had two choices. One: each take a single double duck, or two: use of fancy-schmancy Prussic loops to rig the boats together and go down paddling one double duck, with the other trailing behind. Given our firm commitment to making everything as difficult as possible, we went with option two.

The top of the Falls went fine. We floated past Billboard Rock, narrowly missed Block Rock, avoided Island Hole like champs, and veered into the wave train just like we were guiding a raft. Then we dipped our nose into Top Hole to catch the Green Tongue, and that's when the trouble started.

While the ducky we were paddling started to slide in the right direction, the duck we were towing was sucked into Top Hole, and suddenly, so were we. The duck behind us was suddenly on top of us, and in spite of vigorous paddling, our duck was going nowhere. We were stuck. It was only a matter of time before the water overwhelmed us, flipped our boat, and we swam the falls.

Except that didn't happen. By some miracle, Top Hole let us go and we slid down the falls to Bottom Hole. Now we had a different problem. Instead of hitting the hole head-on, we veered into it sideways. Hitting anything sideways is an easy way to enjoy an out-of-boat experience, but I was in no mood for a swim. I leaned hard upstream, so hard I was practically horizontal, and that did the trick. We were out of the falls, both ducks gliding downstream like nothing had gone wrong, and guides who had watched the whole thing shaking their heads.

Was that a fun experience? Not really, but it makes for quite the story.